Subtlety
by DollyPop12
Summary: Picking a last name is more difficult than Jinx could have predicted. Good thing Wally's always there to help.


The way he was staring at her wasn't unnerving, per se, rather, annoying. He had been glancing over at her from the corners of his eyes for well over 10 minutes now as she watched the boring romance movie she planned to make fun of with him.

And she couldn't do that when he was focusing more on her than the film.

In a movement of absolute stealth, she nudged the giant popcorn bowl closer to him. While it almost always sat in her lap, his arm around her and the other shoveling well over four bags worth of the fluffy, buttery treat into his mouth, today was not as usual. His arm was draped across the back of the couch, yes, but he wasn't doing that absolutely insufferable (adorable) action of rubbing her shoulder. And he had only stuffed his mouth with food twice, giant fistfuls of popcorn that he seemed almost absentminded in eating.

This was her last ditch effort. If he didn't react to the popcorn bowl landing in his lap, something had to be wrong. Jinx would bet her spleen that the boy wouldn't be able to resist food.

When he didn't reach for the bowl or, really, react to it at all, she sighed, determining that she was down one spleen.

Bad luck indeed.

"Okay, I'll bite. What is it?" she asked, turning slightly so that she faced him. Only the glowing television allowed any light to be illuminated on him, and she noted that his expression didn't change at all.

"Nothing" he said simply, his head tilting as he looked at her even more critically.

She raised a nonexistent eyebrow. "Alright, sure. And you're looking at me like that because?"

"Trying to figure something out."

She didn't hold down her snort. "About?"

Silence.

She huffs and falls back against the couch, knowing that she's hit his arm. She reaches up, setting two fingers against the inside of his forearm and zapping him with a teeny hex.

"Ow!" he called out, looking at her with those big, blue, puppy dog eyes.

"You deserve it! Now tell me before I hex your buns" she said simply, her pink eyes glowing teasingly.

"Aw, come on, Jinxie! I was just thinking."

"During a cheesy romance film? You usually can't take your eyes off this sap."

He had enough dignity not to pout. The boy had a lot of patience, after all. He needed to, seeing as he was dating the Bad Luck Sorceress (more like the Bad Mood Sorceress, really) and so his naturally large ceiling for insults expanded even more.

You needed some THICK skin to deal with Jinx.

"I was just wondering…" he started, pausing to take in her curious expression. She had grabbed the remote and set the film on mute, turning even more so that she could look at him more easily.

"About?" she questioned, trying to pull out what was on his mind.

"Your name."

"…My name?" she replied. Her voice, usually wispy and a bit raspy anyway was also incredibly dry, as if it were such a stupid thing to think of. "What of it?"

"It's just Jinx."

A roll of her eyes followed that. "Well, it's all I've ever known, so yes."

She kind of understood why he was thinking about it. Ever since she had joined over to the side of the "good" (or, rather, the side of the infinite spandex, as she called it), filling out legal forms had been a complete and total nightmare. She had realized that her name, simply Jinx, was something that wouldn't cut it. There were people in the world that had several names, at least two first, a few middle, a last name and even a Jr. or Sr. tacked on at the end.

Jinx, however, was just that.

Jinx.

When she had first filled out the forms, she told the men and women who would deal with the paperwork that she had never had a last name. Cyborg ran a million and one searches based on her face, trying to see if she ever had a name given to her.

There was nothing.

No birth certificates, no claim. Jinx knew that she hadn't been born with the distinctive features she had now, in fact, she knew that her eyes and hair likely started out as brown, or black, or something equally boring. It was her powers swelling up inside her without her consent that made her skin turn ashen, her hair growing in a light bubble-gum. And she simply supposed that after enough times of her eyes glowing pink, they simply adopted that color as convenience.

But even with those parameters, there was no indication of who the woman could have been before. All Jinx knew was that she had been dropped off at either an orphanage or a foster home as soon as she had started to change and the people who had done so never bothered giving her a name. She had run away soon enough and joined HIVE Academy, and been given the name of Jinx and that was all she could ever remember being called.

Being a villain, someone who didn't really belong in society meant that only having a first name was absolutely no problem at all. Being a legal citizen and one who protected the public on top of that, however, meant that she needed a name outside of just her first.

If she wanted to live with Wally West, that is.

And as much as she didn't want to admit it, she didn't want to be like Starfire or Raven, Cyborg or Beast Boy held up in the tower. She kind of wanted to be a real citizen instead of just a vigilante, and being with her redheaded, speedster boyfriend of three years was kind of the icing on the whole, new happy cake.

But that meant that she needed a real name. When she had filled the forms out a few months ago, they had said that they would try to have them processed with just a first name, but recently they told her that she needed to get herself forms for creating a persona.

Which, really, wasn't that big of a deal.

Or, at least, it wouldn't be if it didn't involve about a million and one pieces of paper she had to constantly sift through and read over, trying not to make it burst into pink, destructive flames.

It was a topic that Wally never brought up before. To him, she was Jinx and there was no problem with that, and she was pretty confused as to why he would bring it up at all. Sure, thinking about it was natural, but the boy almost never brought up things like that. Things that could prove to prod at the vulnerable meat of her neglected childhood.

She sighs.

"Are you bringing this up because of the forms?"

"Kind of. I might have thought of a way that you don't have to do them."

"Oh really now, Speedy boy?"

"Hey! I'm nothing like him."

"Yeah, yeah." She replied, smirking as she tossed a piece of popcorn at him, laughing when it hit his nose. He shook his head, but grinned at her laughter. When he had first met her, she seemed like she was just too miserable to let out chuckles like that.

"I'm just saying! Thinkin' up a whole new name must be stressful."

Between her dying giggles, she simply nodded, still amused. She reached her hand into the bowl of popcorn. "Maybe you can help out?" she offered, popping a few of the pieces in her mouth.

"Ooooor, you could just take mine" he answered innocently.

* * *

_The rest of the night was spend doing the Heimlich and realizing that it would take an equal, if not a larger amount of paperwork to make the pink haired girl into Jinx West. But for some strange, unexplainable reason, she definitely didn't seem to mind._

_She still expected a ring though._

* * *

**...Don't judge me. *crawls into her cave while obsessing over Flinx* **

**WHY CAN'T YOU BE CANON FOREVER!?**


End file.
